PangoCairo shows cluttered text when cairo context is scaled

Question

I'm playing around with PangoCairo and found out that if the cairo context is scaled, pango draws letters closer together when scale is less than 1 and spaced from each other when scale is more than one.

Here is the minimum example (I've took it from https://developer.gnome.org/pango/stable/pango-Cairo-Rendering.html PangoCairo documentation and just added scale)

#include <math.h>
#include <pango/pangocairo.h>

static void
draw_text (cairo_t *cr)
{
#define RADIUS 150
#define N_WORDS 10
#define FONT "Sans Bold 27"
#define SCALE .5

  PangoLayout *layout;
  PangoFontDescription *desc;
  int i;

  /* Center coordinates on the middle of the region we are drawing
   */
  cairo_translate (cr, RADIUS, RADIUS);

  /* Create a PangoLayout, set the font and text */
  layout = pango_cairo_create_layout (cr);

  pango_layout_set_text (layout, "Text", -1);
  desc = pango_font_description_from_string (FONT);
  pango_layout_set_font_description (layout, desc);
  pango_font_description_free (desc);

  /* Draw the layout N_WORDS times in a circle */
  for (i = 0; i < N_WORDS; i++)
    {
      int width, height;
      double angle = (360. * i) / N_WORDS;
      double red;

      cairo_save (cr);

      /* Gradient from red at angle == 60 to blue at angle == 240 */
      red   = (1 + cos ((angle - 60) * G_PI / 180.)) / 2;
      cairo_set_source_rgb (cr, red, 0, 1.0 - red);

      cairo_rotate (cr, angle * G_PI / 180.);

      /* Inform Pango to re-layout the text with the new transformation */
      pango_cairo_update_layout (cr, layout);

      pango_layout_get_size (layout, &width, &height);
      cairo_move_to (cr, - ((double)width / PANGO_SCALE) / 2, - RADIUS);
      pango_cairo_show_layout (cr, layout);

      cairo_restore (cr);
    }

  /* free the layout object */
  g_object_unref (layout);
}

int main (int argc, char **argv)
{
  cairo_t *cr;
  char *filename;
  cairo_status_t status;
  cairo_surface_t *surface;

  if (argc != 2)
    {
      g_printerr ("Usage: cairosimple OUTPUT_FILENAME\n");
      return 1;
    }

     filename = argv[1];

  surface = cairo_image_surface_create (CAIRO_FORMAT_ARGB32,
                                        2 * RADIUS * SCALE, 2 * RADIUS * SCALE);
  cr = cairo_create (surface);

  cairo_set_source_rgb (cr, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0);
  cairo_paint (cr);
  cairo_scale(cr, SCALE, SCALE);
  draw_text (cr);
  cairo_destroy (cr);

  status = cairo_surface_write_to_png (surface, filename);
  cairo_surface_destroy (surface);

  if (status != CAIRO_STATUS_SUCCESS)
    {
      g_printerr ("Could not save png to '%s'\n", filename);
      return 1;
    }

  return 0;
}

Here how the rendered text looks like when there are no modification to the tutorial source or SCALE is set to 1:

With SCALE 0.5:

And with SCALE 1.5:

I'm sure I'm doing something wrong, but googling doesn't help many.